How to grow your savings

30 March 2012 / Issue 582

PLUS:

Is this the start of a new bull market?

Let the high street die with dignity

Five reasons to expect a huge dollar rally

Excerpt

We’re bored, but still bears

If you bought US shares at the peak of the market in 2007 and have reinvested all your dividends ever since, you are now pretty much evens. You might not think that zero (or -15% or so in inflation-adjusted terms) is much of a return over nearly five years. But given the extent of the global financial crisis it has coincided with, you should probably be grateful for it.

The question is: how long will it take for you to be more than evens? If you listen to Goldman Sachs, the answer is “not long at all”. They think that after the disasters of the banking crisis, we are now at the beginning of a splendid bull market.

We sum up the argument here: The return of the bull. It boils down, first, to the fact that US equities yield significantly more than bonds, which hasn’t been the case since the 1950s, and, second, to the idea that the next decade will see extraordinary global growth.

Do we agree? We’d like to: we are bored bears here. But we aren’t yet convinced. The yield argument is tricky given sovereign yields are artificially low. If they weren’t, would the argument stack up?